Month: November 2008

With Thanksgiving coming up… a lot of
us are thinking about prepping the big turkey. Some
people will be eating Tofurky instead. It’s a meat
substitute made out of tofu. Rebecca Williams got
a cooking lesson from a devoted Tofurky fan and her
meat-eating boyfriend:

Transcript

With Thanksgiving coming up… a lot of us are thinking about prepping the big turkey. Some people will be eating Tofurky instead. It’s a meat substitute made out of tofu. Rebecca Williams got a cooking lesson from a devoted Tofurky fan and her meat-eating boyfriend:

Jennifer Sullivan is a vegan… so she doesn’t eat any animal products at all – no eggs, no milk, no meat. Every Thanksgiving… she eats Tofurky. It comes in a little box.

(opening box)

“Okay so it’s a little different. (laughs) It basically comes as a little loaf. Tofu loaf.”

It’s like a squishy little brown football… in plastic.

“You just take off the casing here… (crinkling plastic) put it in a casserole dish… you’re gonna want to cook that for an hour and 15 minutes…”

While Jennifer bastes her Tofurky in the oven… her boyfriend chops potatoes and asparagus.

(chopping under)

Jim Blough was raised on beef and pork. This is his very first Tofurky.

“The name was kinda funny at first because I guess I never thought of it. You know I’ve had a lot of tofu… now. You know it’ll probably be a little different taste but it’ll be something I’m sure will be very delicious and I’m looking forward to it.”

Jim and Jennifer have been together six months… so maybe you’re thinking, uh huh… he’s just trying to be nice. But Jennifer says she doesn’t force Jim or anyone else to eat tofu.

“That’s okay, that’s their choice. I’ve just chosen a different lifestyle.”

(Oven timer beeps)

“All right, here’s our Tofurky… pretty much just like a turkey, nice and brown.”

(Tofurky sizzling)

“I’m gonna let Jim do the honors he’s gonna carve the Tofurky for the first time.”

(Slicing sound)

Jim: “You know, texture-wise it carves like a turkey…”

Yeah… it’s not quite as dramatic to carve a little brown Tofurky.

“Hopefully it tastes good after our cooking now… (laughs).”

Okay, now… the verdict.

Jim: “It’s really good… when you chew it, it has consistency like a turkey… it’s not mushy or anything it’s very firm. Jen: It’s really good!”

Yeah, okay, well… the real test… will be Thanksgiving Day. Jennifer will meet Jim’s family for the first time… and yup, you guessed it – she’ll be taking a Tofurky.

Transcript

Thanksgiving is just around the
corner. A consumer expert says you can
avoid wasting a lot of food with just a
little planning. Lester Graham reports:

A study by the University of Arizona estimates that the average household wastes about
14% of the food that’s bought. Some of it spoils. Some of it becomes leftovers that
never get eaten.

Bob Lilienfeld is the author of the Use Less Stuff Report. He says you can keep a
couple of things in mind. If food is left on the serving platter, it can be re-used. If it
makes it to your plate and it’s not eaten, it’s wasted.

He also says, on Thanksgiving, plan for leftovers.

“Think, when you buy turkey, ‘What else does my family like turkey. Oh, they like soup.
They like chili.’ Buy the ingredients for the next round when you buy the turkey so that
everything is sitting in your home the day after Thanksgiving, and you’re wondering,
‘Alright, what am I going to do with this bird?’”

And, Lilienfeld says, label and date your leftovers. You’re more likely to use them
before they go bad.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

A study found that people think of pollution coming from big
environmental disasters, and not daily exposure to chemicals from carpeting,
furniture, cosmetics and other things we buy
(Source: Immanuel Giel at Wikimedia Commons)

Transcript

A new study finds people are
surprised to learn how much of their
exposure to chemicals comes from the
things they buy. Rebecca Williams reports:

In this study, researchers showed women the results of tests done in their
homes. The researchers sampled dust and they also measured chemicals in the
women’s bodies. On average, they found about 20 different chemicals.

Rebecca Gasior-Altman is the lead author of the study in the Journal of Health
& Social Behavior.

“Participants were surprised about where these chemicals were coming from
and did not anticipate that they were likely coming from products they brought
into their homes every day and used on their bodies unknowingly and were not
from big industrial dumps.”

She says, before, the women had thought of pollution coming from big
environmental disasters, and not daily exposure to chemicals from carpeting,
furniture, cosmetics and other things we buy.

Transcript

President-elect Barack Obama says
America will open a new chapter in dealing
with climate change. Lester Graham reports
the Senator confirmed he will work toward
the plan he outlined during the presidential
campaign:

In a surprise video statement that opened the Governors’ Global Climate Summit in Los
Angeles, Obama said there’ll be no more denial or delay. As soon as he’s president,
America will help lead toward global cooperation on climate change, starting with a
federal carbon cap-and-trade program and making investments in clean energy.

Bill Kovacs with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce likes the investments idea, but
cautions restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions could hurt business.

“You need to be very sensitive, especially in a stressed-out economy that you could end
up imposing very huge costs on virtually everybody who participates in the economy.”

President-elect Obama said in the video statement he’ll work with business.

“Any company that’s willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington.”

Environmentalists applauded the statement. It’s the first on climate change since
Barack Obama won the presidency.

Related Links

David Lanfear recently ‘installed’ one on his own garage roof, so his
neighbors could see the benefits (Photo by Joyce Kryszak)

When most people put a new roof on
their home they usually use standard asphalt
or tile roofing. But other people are going
for something more natural. They’re planting
grass and flowers on their houses. Joyce
Kryszak talked with one builder in
Western New York who planted a green roof on
his garage to show his neighbors how it works:
http://environmentreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/feature_kryszak_112408.mp3

Transcript

When most people put a new roof on
their home they usually use standard asphalt
or tile roofing. But other people are going
for something more natural. They’re planting
grass and flowers on their houses. Joyce
Kryszak talked with one builder in
Western New York who planted a green roof on
his garage to show his neighbors how it works:

About 90% of all residential roofs are made out of manufactured
asphalt.

But builder David Lanfear knows that nothing tops mother nature.
He makes roofs out of gardens.

Lanfear recently ‘installed’ one on his own garage roof, so his
neighbors could see the benefits. There are beautiful flowering
plants visible over the edge of the flat roof. Lanfear says they’ve got
the whole birds and bees thing going on.

“We’ve noticed a big increase in insects, butterflies, birds all
sorts of new birds that I haven’t ever seen. They’re up there
eating something. Bugs? But its kind of nice to sit on the deck
and watch this nature in the city thing,” said Lanfear.

But the living roof isn’t a novelty. Lanfear says the roofs are more
eco-friendly. He says a living roof provides a whole cascade of
environmental benefits.

“Especially in a downtown when you get a hard rainfall the water
washes off all at once. There’s nothing to absorb it. If you had
a roof like this it absorbs the water and let’s it off slowly. So, it
not only slows the runoff, it cools the water and it starts to filter
the water. It filters some of the atmospheric crud out.
Otherwise, you get super heated water rushing off into the storm
sewer, and then out into the river or the lake and effecting the
environment there,” said Lanfear.

Once his neighbors understood the concept, they stopped thinking
Lanfear was crazy. A few even offered to give him a hand planting
his roof.

First the roof was reinforced with used lumber. Next are the
waterproof barriers – a rubber membrane, a root barrier made out of
old billboards and some old carpeting. Finally, recycled, crushed
concrete is shoveled on to be used as soil for the plants to grow in.

It’s all sustainable. And the native plants require very little water or
maintenance.

Neighbor Deborah Bach loves to garden. So, she was happy to
pitch in. Bach says the concrete soil needs to be doctored to enrich
it. But they have a reuse idea for that too.

“My son works at Starbucks and they give out free grounds for
gardens. So, we’re going to try doing that to try to balance this
out. You know, using recycled materials and things that have
already been used,” said Bach.

Another neighbor stopped by to help. Alex Sowyrda is a high school
technology teacher who’s interested in the science of green roofs.
He plans to share what he learns with his students.

“I try to bring it into my curriculum at school and, hopefully, the
kids graduating high school now take this knowledge with them
and are able to make responsible choices in the way they build
and the way they design in the future,” said Sowyrda.

The living roof builder David Lanfear says it’s a concept that can grow
on anyone. Even people who grew up with more traditional roofs. He
says to start small – with a garage roof – or maybe even smaller.

“We all have little expanses of roof in front of windows. And in
the summer you might notice that when the window is open the
hot air blows in, a lot of that heat comes from that little bit of
roof. If we could just put sections one square yard of living roof
outside of our windows on the porch roof, that would make a
drastic difference in cooling our house – simple,” said Lanfear.

And pretty cheap. Lanfear says the cost of materials is about the
same as an asphalt roof. But he says there’s savings in the long run
because the green roof can last three times as long.

Transcript

Large cities in the US are still
struggling to find ways to recycle their trash.
That’s because you can’t use the same program
for every high-rise, office building or condo.
One city is trying to attack this problem by
digging through the garbage. Mike Rhee reports:

(sound of trucks beeping)

This is a waste transfer facility on Chicago’s South Side. It’s kind of a temporary dump.

Garbage trucks pick up trash from people’s homes and pile it up here. The piles are then packed
onto even bigger trucks and hauled to landfills far away.

Chris Martel looks over the mounds of trash here. Martel is an engineer, and a solid waste
expert.

“There’s a lot of different paper types here, there’s a plastic bottles, all things that are recyclable.”

But they’re probably not going to be recycled. They’re going to a landfill. That’s why Martel is
here.

He works for a consulting firm called CDM, or Camp Dresser and McKee.

The city of Chicago has hired the company to dig through residents’ trash and figure out what
exactly people are throwing away. Martel has been doing waste sorts like this for more than a
decade.

As we walk to another part of the building, he remembers his first one fondly.

“That’s where I fell in love with my wife, after giving her flowers out of the trash and stuffed
animals out of the trash.”

She didn’t mind they were recycled.

We get to the waste sorting area. There’s a group of workers surrounded by dozens of large and
small bins.

(BOOM)

(laughs) “That boom was the tipper dropping the waste load.”

A rugged, yellow loader dumps about 300 pounds of garbage at our feet. It’s a sample from one
of the large piles in the facility.

A team starts sorting through the garbage.

Scott Keddy is one of them. He picks up a plastic garbage bag.

“We just open it up and see what kind of surprises lie inside, like it could be this #1 plastic PET
bottle, or this rigid, plastic thinga-ma-jobber that did something for somebody at some point,
which is different from that.”

They’re sorting them into 81 different containers. Each one is for a kind of paper, plastic, metal,
food or some other piece of trash.

The point is to figure out how much of each material people are throwing out. And where it’s all
coming from.

Suzanne Malec-McKenna is commissioner for Chicago’s Department of Environment.

She says the tough thing about creating a recycling program in a city like Chicago is the diversity.
Not only do you have residents and businesses creating waste, but restaurants, prisons,
manufacturers for car parts. Each of these creates a different kind of garbage.

The city has been trying to come up with a recycling program that works for everyone for 20
years. Malec-McKenna says the study will help the city decide how to manage it all.

“You can’t have a cookie cutter approach for a city this diverse. You’ve got to come up with a
range of different kind of program options for it. We’ll come up with the right mix.”

But while the city figures recycling out, the garbage will keep piling up in landfills.

Martel, the waste expert, says he hopes that waste is reduced soon. He says most people don’t
understand the sheer quantities of garbage that are out there.

“Unless you physically see and touch it you don’t realize what a large amount it is and what the
implications are and how easy it is to divert these materials.”

Big cities around the country are realizing this, and working on a solution.

Transcript

If you think Al Gore’s movie, ‘An
Inconvenient Truth,’ is one of the only
environmental films out there, think again.
There are so many movies about the environment
that entire festivals have been created to
showcase them. Jennifer Guerra
has more:

Susan Woods got to choose which movies to include in Michigan’s first ever Green on
the Big Screen film festival.

“It was quite daunting in the beginning, to tell you the truth, when I started looking
up all these films. I thought oh my goodness, how can I select them. There’s too
many to select.”

She eventually settled on about 30 films, including King Corn. Curt Ellis produced the
documentary, which is all about – yup, you guess it – corn and our dependence on it for
almost everything we eat.

(sound from movie)

“When you’re telling a story about the natural world, you really have to be able to
transport people to the place you’re talking about.”

And Ellis thinks the best way to do that – short of lecturing people in a cornfield in the
middle of Iowa – is to show them a film.

“The reason we make documentaries – Lord knows it’s not for the profit – the
reason we make film is because we believe film can make a difference.”

“My opinion of media effects in terms of film actually producing social action is
pretty limited.”

That’s Daniel Herbert. He teaches film at the University of Michigan. You could say he’s
got a healthy amount of skepticism when it comes to films’ impact on environmental
change.

“Unless you have policies in your city government without recycling, what does it
matter if you’ve watched An Inconvenient Truth? If Al Gore’s telling you to buy
$30 light bulbs and you make 9 bucks at Starbucks, what’s it matter?”

Plus he says you run the risk of having audiences think that just because they watched the
film they’ve somehow participated in solving the problem.

That said, if he had to choose between showing an environmental film at a festival, a
commercial movie theater or on TV? Herbert says he’d pick the festival. Sure, there’s
probably a greater audience to be had with television, and it’s a little more convenient to
just Netflix the film and watch it from home, but you lose something that way.

Susan Woods – she’s from the Michigan film festival – she says a festival can provide a
whole different experience.

“The difference is that these people are sitting home in a dark room as opposed to
being with a group of people who have the same mind set. And I think that’s the big
difference.”

And, she says, at a festival, if you feel inspired by one of the films, you can go up to a
director afterward and ask questions, or talk with a climate change expert about solutions
or sign up with a local environmental group.

Something you definitely wouldn’t be able to do sitting at home alone in the dark with
your TV.

Transcript

Watching paychecks shrink and
retirement funds dissolve is making people
change their buying habits. Many are
skipping things like natural foods because
they’re seen as luxuries. But Julie Grant
reports some analysts say this is just a
short term trend:

Michelle DeSalvo’s daughter plans to go to college next
year. But her husband might need to take a pay cut just to
keep his job. So they’re trying to save money wherever
possible. That means no more shopping at the natural foods
store.

Michelle DeSalvo: “It’s definitely more expensive. You have
to go to things that are less expensive and natural is
definitely not that.”

Brenda Fisher says her family is struggling to pay for two
kids in college, and they’re looking for different ways to buy
food. She used to stop at the butcher shop at Whole Foods
– the national, natural foods supermarket. But not anymore.

“So I would buy their meats because their meats are
incredible. So um, I just can’t afford it. I would actually like
to buy a whole cow from a farmer, because they’re cheaper.
And I just have to get the money together.”

Okay, so not everyone wants to buy a cow. But a lot of
people are moving away from things that seem more
expensive – like natural and organic products.

In recent years, those foods have seen huge sales growth.
But as the economy has turned sour, so have their sales.
Whole Foods Store has seen a considerable sales drop at its
stores. And the company’s stock prices plunged more than
70% this year.

Nancy Koehn is professor of the history of retailing and
consumer behavior at the Harvard business school.
She says some people see upscale stores such as Whole
Foods as an indulgence – and that’s not what they’re
wanting.

“I think we will see, we are seeing, a rush away from a lot of
luxury right now.”

Koehn says that’s short term. She says consumers have
been floored by the tanking of the stock market and the
vulnerability of the financial systems. And they’ve done
something we haven’t seen in 25 years: they’ve stopped
buying.

But Koehn says this is just one moment. She says people
will walk back into stores. But they will have revised
priorities for their homes and families.

“There’s no way anyone’s coming out of this moment without
being effected by it. It’s a much more complicated story than
the rush to Wal-Mart.”

Koehn says natural foods stores, like Whole Foods, and
other environmentally-centered companies, are actually in
just the right place for the long term economic trend. When
consumers start buying again, she thinks, many will spend
money in places that are taking care of workers, animals,
and the environment.

“And I think we’re going to see that the same things that built
Whole Foods, that have made the environment and our
interconnectedness so important to people, and moved that
from item number 10 or 20 on people’s lists of important
issues up to the top 2 to 4. Those aren’t going away because
we’re in the trough of a business cycle.”

Koehn expects that many people will spend their holiday
money at big box discount stores. But she says many who
feel they’ve been treated badly in the economic downturn will
go back to the companies they think treat people and the
environment better.

Koehn expects that by early next year, companies that get
behind sustainable products will wind up being the economic
winners.

Transcript

Environmental groups are touting the campaign promises of President Elect
Barack Obama. They predict he’ll be open to environmental clean-up and clean
energy programs.

Michael Kraft is a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay.
He’s adding a note of financial caution.

”It’s no surprise that the federal government is running a very large deficit this
year and that the national debt is very big and that the country is entering an
economic downturn. So, the challenge will be deciding how much we can afford
to spend and in what years we can afford to spend it. “

Kraft says that could affect funding for programs aimed at cleaning up pollution.
And it could also pinch environmental regulators from the US EPA.

Kraft also says new spending may have a better chance when backers can prove
it will help the environment and not hurt the economy.